


Now I'm bound by the life you left behind

by EponineTheStrange (gallifreyandglowclouds)



Category: Doctor Who RPF
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-13
Updated: 2013-07-13
Packaged: 2017-12-19 07:47:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/881270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gallifreyandglowclouds/pseuds/EponineTheStrange
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Matt's in the hospital and he's dying, and Karen is afraid because she knows that she might not get a chance to tell him how she feels about him. A little girl comes in, and she asks whether Karen is Matt's wife, and Karen says yes and tells the little girl about how much she loves Matt, who then wakes up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Now I'm bound by the life you left behind

Matt’s shaky breaths rack his body. Karen knows that cancer does this to people, but she cannot reconcile the emaciated figure before her with the lively man she once knew. By the time Matt had decided to get the persistent pain in his hips checked out, the cancer has spread so far that they can do palliative chemo and pump him full of morphine, but that’s about it.

Karen hasn’t left his side through all of it – she’s sat beside him when he’s pissing himself and can’t tell what day it is, or when he has the shining bright moments of lucidity, and when he started coughing up blood and had to be taken to the hospital, and though his parents never actually talked to her about the conversation they had with the doctor in charge of Matt’s care, she sort of knew instinctively that he probably wasn’t going to get to come home again.

That was a week ago.

Karen’s been living in guest room in Matt’s house pretty much since he told her that he was sick, but now she can’t be there because everything there makes her think of Matt and all the thing that she should have said to him or done with him when she would have had the chance. So she goes to the Waterstones and the Tesco beside it and buys all sorts of random food and books and sits by his hospital bed and reads to him. Sometimes he’s awake and sometimes he’s not, but the reading to him helps her keep her mind off the fact that her best friend is _dying,_ which is not supposed to happen when seven months prior he was dancing like an idiot at a Kanye West concert.

This particular day has been a really, really bad day, and he hasn’t been awake a lot. She strokes his head and holds his hand and finds that he’s getting a bit cold, which worries her because that means that she knows that the end is coming soon and that terrifies her.

The nurses usually let her stay far later than she is actually supposed to, and so she’s sitting by his bed and holding his hand and listening to the sound of his breathing.

“Hey buddy,” Karen whispers, “if you need to let go, just do it, okay? It’s okay. You don’t have to hurt any more.”

“Is that your husband?” A little voice asks from the door.

Karen whips her head around and sees a little girl with brown curly hair who can’t possibly more than eight years old standing in the doorway of Matt’s hospital room. In another dimension, Karen thinks, she could have been her and Matt’s child. (She’s been having a lot of thoughts about things like that lately, which just hurts.)

“Hey sweetie,” Karen whispers. “Where are your mummy and daddy?”

“Mummy’s all hooked up to tubes like he is,” the little girl says. “And I don’t know about daddy. I haven’t seen him in while.” She shrugs. “So I decided to go for a walk.”

“Okay,” Karen says. Matt coughs, and she looks over to him, worried.

“Is he your husband?”

Karen looks back at the little girl, and the truth is on the tip of her tongue and she knows that she should tell her the truth, but at this point, a lie probably isn’t going to hurt anyone.

“Yeah,” Karen says. “He is.”

“Do you love him?”

The little girl is still standing in the doorway, and Karen doesn’t feel like inviting her. So she gets up from her chair and goes and sits down beside her. The little girl sits down beside her.

“More than anything ever,” Karen says, and tries to hold back her tears. “He’s the most amazing person I’ve ever met, and you know, maybe he doesn’t always tell me that he loves me everyday, but you know what he does? He shows it, because he’s always there with soup when I’m sick and tea and cuddles when I’m sad, and that’s what really matters, you know?”

The little girl doesn’t look like she really understands, but nods anyways.

“He just makes me so happy,” Karen whispers, and here she is, pouring out all of these things that she hasn’t been able to say to anyone, least of all Matt, to this little girl who she has just met. “I love him. I love him so, so much.”

“Wow,” the little girl says. “Is he going to be okay?”

Karen shakes her head.

“My daddy misses my mummy because of that,” the little girl says quietly. “She’s not going to get better either.”

She hugs the little girl then, squeezes her tightly to her, and the little girl is crying and Karen is trying to make her stop, because then she might start crying too and that would benefit no one.

A nurse comes down the hall then, and taps Karen on the shoulder.

“This,” the nurse says sharply, “is little Jacqueline Marshall, who probably shouldn’t be wandering off and giving her daddy a fright in the middle of the night.”

The little girl looks sheepish, but she stands up and wipes her eyes.

“Good night, Jacqueline,” Karen says as the nurse leads her away. The little girl waves back at her.

She gets off the ground and resumes her vigil in her chair. She is exceptionally surprised, however, to see Matt looking back at her with clear-ish eyes.

“Hey wifey,” he says with a weak smile.

“I’m sorry,” Karen says. “Bit of wishful thinking on my part.”

“There’s been a lot of that on my part as well, Kazza,” he says, hoarsely.

She reaches out for his hand and wraps her fingers in his, because she just needs to touch him right now. “God, I’m so sorry, Matt.”

“Me too, Kaz,” he whispers. “I love you.”

She nods but she can’t speak, and tears flow down her face freely.

He squeezes her hand. “If I budge over, I think this bed has room for two. You’ve been sleeping in that chair far too long.

There’s just a sliver of mattress space left for her, so she lies on her side against his shoulder. He leans over and kisses her on the cheek, and she kisses his forehead tenderly.

“In another universe,” he says, looking up at the ceiling, “I bet you and I got a happy ending.”

“We’d deserve it,” Karen says quietly. 


End file.
